Fall 2012 Class Descriptions

2-4 credit(s)Requirement: SkillsConcentration(s): Public Interest Law (JD), Environmental and Energy Law (JD), Environmental and Energy Law (LLMG)

The Land Use Clinic provides students with the opportunity to become involved in land use and land development issues. Students are placed with government agencies, elected officials or attorneys in private practice. Most placements are with the City of San Diego and include the City Attorney’s Office, the Mayor’s Office, and City Council offices. Students work under the supervision of an attorney. Student work usually focuses on local issues including the procedures for siting cell phone towers, the regulation of adult entertainment and cardrooms, reviewing environmental documents, attending community meetings and issues involving affordable housing. The weekly two-hour classroom component covers the basic statutory and regulatory framework of land use law and procedures. In addition to the class students are required to attend one local community planning group meeting. The clinic is graded on a 4-tier Pass-Fail basis. No prerequisites.

Note: There are limitations on JD concentration eligibility. Please check the Environmental & Energy Law Concentration web page for more information.Additional Information:Environmental & Energy Law Concentration

2-4 credit(s)Requirement: SkillsConcentration(s): Public Interest Law (JD), Environmental and Energy Law (JD), Environmental and Energy Law (LLMG)

The Land Use Clinic provides students with the opportunity to become involved in land use and land development issues. Students are placed with government agencies, elected officials or attorneys in private practice. Most placements are with the City of San Diego and include the City Attorney’s Office, the Mayor’s Office, and City Council offices. Students work under the supervision of an attorney. Student work usually focuses on local issues including the procedures for siting cell phone towers, the regulation of adult entertainment and cardrooms, reviewing environmental documents, attending community meetings and issues involving affordable housing. The weekly two-hour classroom component covers the basic statutory and regulatory framework of land use law and procedures. In addition to the class students are required to attend one local community planning group meeting. The clinic is graded on a 4-tier Pass-Fail basis. No prerequisites.

Note: There are limitations on JD concentration eligibility. Please check the Environmental & Energy Law Concentration web page for more information.Additional Information:Environmental & Energy Law Concentration

Students interview, counsel, and represent clients in Superior Court unlawful detainer trials, in administrative hearings involving federally subsidized Section 8 termination proceedings, in Superior Court involving Writs of Administrative Mandamus, and in the Appellate Department of the Superior Court and the Fourth District Court of Appeal involving appeals from the various trial court proceedings. An adjunct professor/attorney supervises students, who draft pleadings and correspondence, conduct discovery, and confer and negotiate with opposing counsel/parties. Weekly group meetings are combined with individual case conferences to provide intensive personal training in litigation techniques, problem solving, and case management. Students also learn general civil litigation practice and procedures. Prerequisites: Civil Procedure and Evidence. Preference will be given to those applicants who have taken Practicum or Lawyering Skills II, and who are willing to take three units. The clinic is graded on a 4-tier Pass-Fail basis.

Students interview, counsel, and represent clients in Superior Court unlawful detainer trials, in administrative hearings involving federally subsidized Section 8 termination proceedings, in Superior Court involving Writs of Administrative Mandamus, and in the Appellate Department of the Superior Court and the Fourth District Court of Appeal involving appeals from the various trial court proceedings. An adjunct professor/attorney supervises students, who draft pleadings and correspondence, conduct discovery, and confer and negotiate with opposing counsel/parties. Weekly group meetings are combined with individual case conferences to provide intensive personal training in litigation techniques, problem solving, and case management. Students also learn general civil litigation practice and procedures. Prerequisites: Civil Procedure and Evidence. Preference will be given to those applicants who have taken Practicum or Lawyering Skills II, and who are willing to take three units. The clinic is graded on a 4-tier Pass-Fail basis.

This course introduces the student to the burgeoning field of legal thought on the intersection of law and economics. It analyzes a wide variety of legal institutions, including property, contract, tort, criminal law, corporate law, and antitrust, from the perspective of the incentive structures that are created by these institutions. In that sense, economic analysis is a value-neutral scientific exploration of cause and effect. However, we will also use economics to ask important normative questions about the legal fields we study. Do the legal rules in these areas result in activity that is privately profitable but socially wasteful? Would alternative legal rules more efficiently coordinate private activity in the service of the public good? There are no prerequisites for this course.

In this course, we shall address the relation of literary and legal practices through close readings of works by Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Washington Cable, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt. These readings will be supplemented by considerations of legal developments in the nineteenth century, with particular, though not exclusive, attention to the Reconstruction amendments. Although most literary historians have characterized the relations between literature and law in the antebellum period as oppositional, with literary writers advocating higher or natural laws associated with racial justice and legal writers insisting upon an increasingly formal and technical positive law, the emergence of legal forms of antislavery thought, leading to constitutional emancipation, usefully complicates this narrative. To what extent, then, does the movement towards constitutional emancipation shape literary writing, and how does literature inform, if not the law, then the imaginative and intellectual conditions in which it is written and interpreted? This course’s assignments—a shorter essay (5-7 pages) and a longer research paper (15-20 pages)—will fulfill the writing requirement of the law school.

Law and Socioeconomics studies the interrelationship between law and economic/social processes. It is interdisciplinary and draws on a variety of economic approaches (not only neoclassical economics) and other social sciences, such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science. It offers students an interdisciplinary, values-based approach to public policy that is designed to take into account the power implications and distributional effects of laws and stresses the importance to effective regulation of attention to historical context, philosophical beliefs, culture, existing institutions, working rules, and sources of power. Students write a paper for this seminar.

This course is designed to provide intensive assistance in legal analysis and legal writing, focusing on the kind of analytical and writing skills necessary for success on law school and bar examinations. Students will receive group and one-on-one instruction in legal analysis and legal writing. The exercises and assignments will closely track the doctrines covered in the substantive class which the course is attached. Enrollment is limited and the class will meet one hour per week. Students who successfully complete the course will receive one academic credit. The course will be graded on an “Honors, Pass, Low Pass, Fail” grading scale. Enrollment may be granted on a first-come, first-served, space available basis, but only if students are: 1) eligible for enrollment in the substantive class to which the course is attached, and 2) actually enrolled in such class – Prof. Dripps

This course is designed to provide intensive assistance in legal analysis and legal writing, focusing on the kind of analytical and writing skills necessary for success on law school and bar examinations. Students will receive group and one-on-one instruction in legal analysis and legal writing. The exercises and assignments will closely track the doctrines covered in the substantive class which the course is attached. Enrollment is limited and the class will meet one hour per week. Students who successfully complete the course will receive one academic credit. The course will be graded on an “Honors, Pass, Low Pass, Fail” grading scale. Enrollment may be granted on a first-come, first-served, space available basis, but only if students are: 1) eligible for enrollment in the substantive class to which the course is attached, and 2) actually enrolled in such class – Prof. Devitt

This course is designed to provide intensive assistance in legal analysis and legal writing, focusing on the kind of analytical and writing skills necessary for success on law school and bar examinations. Students will receive group and one-on-one instruction in legal analysis and legal writing. The exercises and assignments will closely track the doctrines covered in the substantive class which the course is attached. Enrollment is limited and the class will meet one hour per week. Students who successfully complete the course will receive one academic credit. The course will be graded on an “Honors, Pass, Low Pass, Fail” grading scale. Enrollment may be granted on a first-come, first-served, space available basis, but only if students are: 1) eligible for enrollment in the substantive class to which the course is attached, and 2) actually enrolled in such class – Prof. Lilly

Legal Writing & Research I (Staff)LWAA545

2 credit(s)

Legal Writing and Research (LWR) I is the first part of a two-semester program introducing students to the tools lawyers use to analyze, research, and frame legal positions and communicate them in predictive office memoranda. Students practice and actively learn legal writing and research skills by creating multiple drafts of office memoranda and conducting both print and computer-assisted legal research. The course is offered in small sections with very low student-faculty ratios so that faculty may provide individualized and frequent feedback on student work. Required for first-year students.

Legal Writing III: Legal Writing is designed for students seeking to improve their legal writing skills. Students will write a client letter and legal memoranda based on a closed universe of cases. At least one assignment will require a mandatory conference and re-write. In addition, students will complete a series of short assignments focused on grammar and paragraph organization.
Students may only enroll in two of the following during their law school career: Advanced Legal Writing OR LWR III: Lit & Judicial Drafting OR LWR III: Legal Writing OR Legal Drafting. Students desiring to add the second class in this series must receive a signature on their add/drop form from the Office for JD Student Affairs, and provide the form to the Records office (that is, students cannot add the second class themselves online.)

Legal Writing & Research III: Litigation and Judicial Drafting is a course that will help students improve their research, analysis and writing skills in a variety of litigation-simulated contexts. Students will learn how to evaluate a complaint, conduct legal research on causes of action and defenses, and will draft two pieces of litigation-oriented writing (a motion and a judicial opinion). The course will also review how to evaluate legislation and contract language from a litigation and drafting perspective. The course is designed for students who wish to improve their legal research and writing skills, and is particularly helpful to students interested in litigation and judicial clerkships.
Students may only enroll in two of the following during their law school career: Advanced Legal Writing OR LWR III: Lit & Judicial Drafting OR LWR III: Legal Writing OR Legal Drafting. Students desiring to add the second class in this series must receive a signature on their add/drop form from the Office for JD Student Affairs, and provide the form to the Records office (that is, students cannot add the second class themselves online.)

This course, which is offered only to students in the LLM in Comparative Law program, focuses on providing students with: (1) a broad overview of the structure of the U.S. legal system; (2) techniques for successful research , writing and practice of law in the U.S. courts; (3) an introduction to the objective analytical skills that promote success in coursework and in the profession; (4) an introduction to persuasive writing techniques; and (5) techniques for success in class and examinations. The course has a very low student-faculty ratio and faculty carefully review each student’s research and writing assignments. Students are provided opportunities to meet with their professor and revise their written work.

The course examines the increasingly important role of statutes in the American legal system. A substantial part of the course will discuss statutory interpretation - an essential tool for lawyers that is not sufficiently covered elsewhere in the curriculum. The course will also address various aspects of the legislative process, such as campaign finance, initiatives and other forms of direct democracy, term limits, supermajority rules, and the line item veto. Note: This course may be applied as one of the three required courses for the Public Interest Law Concentration (JD).

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